An overview of how our family is prepared(michaelharley.net) |
An overview of how our family is prepared(michaelharley.net) |
The other is to make sure you have a good insurance company. Go to a neighborhood that has experienced a tornado or similar. Ask around -- people will know which insurance companies were helpful and which were penny pinching obstructionists.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Preparedness_Month
General guidelines to have a decent pantry, someway to cook things, some spare water, a way to heat your home if you're in a place that has winter, a source of emergency lighting:
Zombie apocalypses are a fun meme, but a broken city water main or an ice storm can be quite disruptive.
A) Not really that much fun (as evidenced by how shitty life gets for pretty much everyone in "The Walking Dead"). ;)
B) In my mind "The Zombie Apocalypse" has always just been an amusing way to generically refer to whatever future real "apocalypse" might happen to occur (eg; broken water main, ice storm, etc).
I eat one or two a week as regular lunches, to rotate stock. When there's some room at the empty end of the shelf, I shove everything down, and buy some new cans to stuff in at the intake end.
It takes no more time than going to the pantry for a can of soup regularly would. And saves time, because I'm _never_ out and scrambling to find another option. Whether I'm 8 cans down or 24, one trip to the store will replenish it regardless.
Don't overcomplicate it. Folks who blog about things tend to do so because they're proud they achieved something difficult, so you compare yourself to a difficult standard. Resist that.
Even though the campbell's exec declared it "poor food" the jazzy jambalaya has replaced our instant pot recipe. We buy two cans of it, add a package of microwaveable ready rice and have decent (although very carb and sodium heavy) dinner in ~3 minutes.
It also cooks up great in a small pot on a pocket rocket and tastes great right of the can as far as it being suitable for emergency food.
Freeze dried stuff can be sit on a cool, dark shelf for a decade or two; a popular company:
Also need to have a source of water and a way to boil it.
Of course you’ll need a way to cook the dry food. The most sustainable way I know of is a small portable solar system and an instant pot. The instant pot is very energy efficient so you don’t need a very big solar system depending on where you live. If you store flour, you can also get a bread maker, which is pretty efficient.
The reason I like this strategy is that it’s cheap, and you don’t have to think about it very often. You can just trash the food after some number of years. You also don’t have to eat food close to its expiration date normally.
The only hiccup is fat. Cooking oil goes rancid, so you probably want to replace that every year or so, but canola/soybean oil is very cheap.
Of course none of this is very healthy, so you’ll want to include some vitamins…
Grab 2 packs of dried pasta instead of 1 for example. Rice. Beans. Canned stuff like veggies, fish, even the little single serve veg/beans etc.
Anything is better than nothing which is where most people land. Even knowing you got enough food stuffs for a day is enough comfort to ward off panic in disaster situations.
A 24/30pk of 500ml water can be had for like $5/10. Also very useful outside of disaster if they’re cycled through.
The grocery stores all had plenty of fresh food (some things ran short, but there was always plenty) I'm reasonably sure you never needed the camp stove, or any of the other supplies. They might have been nice to have anyway, but never needed.
As I said elsewhere, make sure you can share knowledge and work with other survivors. A community of people with various skills (even if you give them the book and they learn it) makes survival a lot easier. Maybe your garden fails, but if you have a few other people you work with you can support each other and everybody lives.
It feels like you're suggesting prepping for a Shit Hits the Fan type scenario, which the OP post explicitly says is unreasonable. It postulates a world where most people would starve because growing plants to survive through a year is extremely difficult if you don't have any experience doing it, assuming you have enough land time and other resources to even do it properly. And I guess I just doubt that a box of seeds and a willingness to share your garden would see you through the year. You would need a whole lot of luck.
In the worst disasters preppers prepare for - odds are they die, so make sure your neighbors know what plans you have, if you die (or just you are out of town on vacation) your preparation can save someone else's life.
> won't allow looters in the neighborhood
My neighbours will be the first one to "equally share" everything I have with random junkies.
> if you die ... your preparation can save someone else's life.
Yeah, my neighbours make sure I die, and my stash will save their life.
Yes. Shared adversity tends to unite, not divide.
> My neighbours will be the first one to "equally share" everything I have with random junkies.
I guarantee you they won't, just out of self-preservation. They'd rather have you than "random junkies" or a trashed house next door.
It's like the parable of outrunning the bear: you don't have to be completely looter proof, you just have to be a harder target than the next block over. Most of the time that just means having a couple people per block patrolling with a camera to scare them off.
I happened to be in the cellar where I keep my server when it happened. The lights went out and I was in complete darkness other than the lights on the server and drives. I got my phone flashlight working and looked at the screen on the ups. It was working perfectly - the server was running and the amount of minutes remaining was dropping until there was five minutes left and my server initiated shutdown. Later that day when the power came back on the server booted back up.
So I'm a prepper too.
They suggested having at LEAST a weeks worth of supplies, and more if you don't want to be waiting in a very impatient line with a bunch of scared, hungry people that may be desperate.
The other data is harder to quantify, but kind of insane. Like how long DHS estimates it will take to rebuild I-5 (minus major bridges) as a passable road, along with some key railroads, and basic power.
In those early days post storm, I had neighbors regularly knocking on my door to make sure I was OK and I had enough food and water to get through the day. Since we had no internet, everyone was outside talking to each other, walking around and checking in. And we had huge cookouts at the houses with gas stoves so we could cook the perishable stuff before it went bad. Curfew was strict and law enforcement was everywhere, armed National Guard protected the grocery stores from looting.
It was a traumatic experience in some ways. I knew people that lost everything, had friends pulling bodies out of the river, sharing stories I never thought I'd hear in my life. But the community came together, and never once did I think "man I really wish I got into prepper culture".
I personally think it's insane to believe that someone could survive a major event like that completely independent of the community. Humanity got to where it is today because of community, not in spite of it. And prepper culture ignores all of that through it's "can't depend on anyone" ethos. I personally find it really sad.
A large number of people working together will be much more likely to find solutions than a few isolated individuals. The isolated individuals may have disproportionately large survival resources, but probably not for long. If you are in the caring-is-sharing group you will have a much better chance than being in the me-me-bang-oh-shit group.
But there are a lot of people who fear community solidarity because it might lead to people asking questions about private jets and beach condos.
Amateur ("ham") radio can be handy. If you don't want to go to the effort to get a radio, a receive-only AM/FM crank/solar radio can be handy to get news.
I don't totally understand this because quite a lot of disasters or threats will mean you can't shelter in place? Even if it's not your main thing to plan for how can a threat model just rule out wildfires, massive flooding, a hurricane or so on.
Plan for the disasters that are likely where you are. I have plans for a tornado - I shelter in my basement until it blows over, and then the next morning the police will help me get to a hotel (tornadoes are to sudden too evacuate in time, but small enough that the local hotels have extra room). I don't have plans for a hurricane because the closest I get to a hurricane is when the weather reports the minor rain we are seeing is what is left of a major hurricane a week ago.
Virginia
Some places in the UK might have to start worrying more about wildfires. Flooding is definitely on the rise.
(UK flooding is nearly always "you can save a lot of expensive damage with careful sandbagging" rather than "entire building swept away", though)
I suppose this could be true with the rest of CRINK since they are all capable cyber adversaries, but China is on another level in terms of capability and it's their best lever with little cost. I suppose they have to calculate whether the US would bring out the nukes in such a circumstance
If they could do this, wouldn't they already have moved on Taiwan?
But in any case a month makes it more likely you can try and find another source. Better to have some runway than none?
Probably not. My guess is the Pentagon's calculation would be that the cost to intervene would be unacceptable and could not be sustained anyway; many reports say the US would deplete their ammo stocks for such a conflict in like a week, and that was _before_ the blunder in Iran
> Better ... than none?
For sure. But doesn't solve the problem of "how do I survive if the power grid goes down for over a year?" Best solution is to get out of USA prior to that event. I don't think any amount of prep will significantly change your outcome in that scenario if you remain in the US.
Drinking water requires more expensive containers, and some thinking around keeping it fresh (rotation & potentially some chemical additives like bleach).
Water is critical to life and so you want to be sure civilization won't return before you risk drinking random water. That said, I'd keep a camping water treatment instead (there are lots of options) since they take up less space.
* Edit * I've been asked before what the best survival book is. Honestly, it is One Second After by William R. Forstchen. It's probably the best description scenario that could occur.
It is not those regurgitated line drawings that everyone copies from Euell Gibbons, or rehashed rule of 3's survival books.
Non-potable just goes through the usual barrels full of sand and biochar, and doesn’t need further treatment.
* https://www.cdc.gov/water-emergency/about/how-to-create-and-...
The old stuff can be used to water house plants or your garden. If you have advanced warning of an event (e.g., hurricane), you can also fill up a large reserve 'just in time':
* https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/waterbob-bathtub-liner-rev...
Don’t drink from the hot water tap.
And water can be always treated to make it drinkable again.
In the event of an apocalypse, I would probably move back with my parents as they live near a beach in Queensland which is a really good fishing spot. My parents catch big fish from the beach every week. They never buy fish. The area has lots of mango trees. Also, there are kangaroos in the area so there is no shortage of options.
I remember I was surprised when I moved to The Netherlands for a while and one of my colleagues said something along the lines of "As humans, we can't survive without each other." I was thinking to myself WTF? Of course you can. But in retrospect I think maybe Europe isn't quite in the same situation. Low-density nations with good weather like Australia and New Zealand are actually quite unique in that way.
Of course, in densely populated parts of the world, society is completely dependent on modern farming because the 'surrounding nature' cannot provide anywhere near enough food for the population without advanced farming. A disruption in the social order or supply chains would mean that people would have to cannibalize to reach an equilibrium with the surrounding nature.
Survival is nowhere near as hard as most people believe, especially in a warm country without seasons. I used to do week-long camping trips to remote islands without any civilization there. There are people who have been living on remote islands by themselves without any issues for years. Australia is actually quite safe. The things which can kill you are pretty easy to avoid. Snakes are scared of you, crocodiles are only near rivers and lakes and only in some states, sharks and jellyfish are only in the sea, dangerous spiders are pretty rare and mostly mind their own business... No bears, no lions, no wolves (except dingoes but they're smaller and more like wild dogs), no nasty bug-borne diseases.
The most common case of everybody hates me that nobody hates anybody, they just made an incorrect assumption "because of a frown", so get over it and try again. The second one I see is the person who everybody hates is at fault for being a bad person, so if this is the case fix yourself. Discrimination - where they hate you for your group - exists some places in the world, but for the most part it isn't discrimination it is one of the two above incorrectly identified.
In many cases I know of somebody did live alone for a few decades, but when they got old they eventually gave it up.
Don't drink it hot if you think you may have lead pipes.
It's not really disgusting inside, mostly just filled with sediment... which is coming from your water source anyway. Same story, filter and boil as needed.
Either way, much easier than maintaining potable water for the rest of your life for an event that might not ever happen. We haven't had such an event in my area for 100 years. In a pinch with a little boiling you've probably got something in the area of 40-50 gallons available this way.
A natural disaster ties together the fates of everyone living in the area. When law and order break down, the people living nearest to you are the most important guarantors of your own safety. Attack or hurt your neighbor and you've only made yourself less safe from outsiders.
All this to say the neighbor would have to be particularly stupid, short-sighted, and sociopathic. Or have a foolproof survival or evacuation plan. Other than that, your survival and co-operation is in their best interest.
- Check the air pressure of your spare tire in your vehicles
- Take inventory of your home
- Test your sump pump
..
..
Major metropolitan areas devolved over centuries from how I understand history (I'm not an expert). that means you and your descendants have time to figure it out. However where to go is a question. My [very limited] plan is since I live in Iowa, I'll just find a farmer who can't get fuel for his tractors and thus can't afford to farm his land anyway - I'll buy a small homestead cheap and make it work. I have a few books from 1920 on how to do things that might be useful, but I suspect the local library has others. However if you live in New York you will find all the land taken by the time you can walk to Iowa...
There is also the case where war killed everybody in the city, but that isn't devolve and I'll ignore it: prepping for an afterlife is a religious discussion. I feel the need to acknowledge this though just in case.
Overall though, I don't think this is a realistic thing. I haven't done much more prepping than the above. Civilization won't collapse - and even if it did I'd probably die in the collapse so I'm focusing my preparing on religion which applies even if civilization doesn't collapse.
Contrary to urban legends (and fictional entertainment), in times of disaster humans generally pull together:
The guns were used to protect houses and the neighbor's house though. So this could well fall into what you meant by useful in your home. (but if that is what you meant locked shouldn't have been added)